Getting your small business off the ground can be a harrowing task for aspiring entrepreneurs. In addition to the usual responsibilities of managing your expenses and cultivating relationships with customers and industry peers, new firms must also tackle digital marketing head-on if they’re going to be competitive in the modern market.
If you’re unfamiliar with some of the more difficult or arcane concepts surrounding digital marketing, it helps to have a trusted advisor who can guide you through the difficult early days of growing your business. This accounts for the recent boom in the number of digital marketing agencies — most small businesses simply can’t afford to have a full-time digital marketing expert on staff when they’re just starting out.
Webfirm, a full-service digital marketing agency headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, understands these challenges and growing pains better than most. They started out as a small shop during the early Wild West days of the Web, and grew into a powerhouse firm with hundreds of clients today.
And one service has proved essential in helping Webfirm both improve their day-to-day operations and deliver superior outcomes for their clients: The advanced call tracking and analytics provided by CallRail.
Quick and simple setup, plus flexible pricing
Webfirm’s mission is simple: They use the best technology and techniques available to help their clients make good marketing decisions and grow their businesses.
“If you’re a small-to-medium business looking to expand online, we are your go-to,” says Andrew Coventry, account director at Webfirm. “We want to be top of mind for businesses both in Australia and abroad when they’re looking for a ‘toolkit’ containing everything they need for their business to really take off digitally.”
Webfirm has been in business since 2001, so their team has quite a bit of experience when it comes to the ins-and-outs of digital marketing. But down through the years, they kept on running into blind spots and stumbling blocks when it came to attribution for telephone calls, a key lead-generation channel that is used extensively by many of their clients.
“For a long time, the only way we could really prove ROI to our clients was through showing how many leads they were getting through their websites, or through channels like PPC and email,” Coventry explains. At the time, the best anyone could do was provide an educated guesstimate about how their phone lines were performing.
“We were able to measure [web] channels thanks to Google Analytics, but there was never any way to accurately measure the performance of the client’s phone calls,” he adds. “That meant we were missing analytics for a huge chunk of leads, and how they came to the client’s website. So, we might have had a rough sense that a phone campaign was performing well, but it was difficult and time-consuming to prove that to the client.”
So when call tracking technology became affordable and portable enough to suit non-enterprise businesses, Webfirm jumped at the chance to incorporate it into their range of services. And after running a comparison between the different call tracking providers available in Australia, CallRail emerged as the clear leader for its advanced feature set, integrations, and flexible pricing plans.
And most importantly of all for the Webfirm team, CallRail features a super-simple native integration with AgencyAnalytics, Webfirm’s main CRM: “Setting up the integration was a very, very simple process — I can’t give enough credit to CallRail and AgencyAnalytics for this integration,” Coventry says. “Setting it up was simple as logging in to both platforms and making a few clicks to connect the two, and that was that.”
Advanced analytics and call recordings bring clarity and confidence
Webfirm’s experience with call tracking also illuminated a critical marketing insight, which they’ve been keen to share with their clients: Your marketing success goes beyond the numbers and percentages you’re seeing for your conversion rate, or your ROI. You also need to be able to appraise the ‘softer’ parts of the marketing funnel, like how your sales and service teams is interacting with your customers and prospects.
That’s why CallRail’s call recording feature proved to be an invaluable part of Webfirm’s marketing toolkit. By recording sales calls for later review, Webfirm was able to more accurately qualify their clients’ incoming leads and help identify any skill or performance gaps that might be causing trouble.
“With them being able to dive in and listen back to their phone calls, [our clients] have been able to identify some huge skill gaps among their staff,” Coventry says. “And they don’t have to take our word for it, since they’re able to login to the account themselves and listen in. There’s been a lot of value here for our clients, who use these call recordings to train their staff around stuff like how to better capture leads.”
He adds: “Anyone in this business pays a fair bit of money to bring in new leads, so it was very illuminating for some of our clients to see exactly where those leads are dropping out of their sales funnel.”
The upshot for Webfirm and their clients is a more complete and accurate picture of how incoming leads are finding them, no matter the channel from which they arrived. And by using call recording for training and lead qualification, they can ensure they’re never missing an opportunity to capitalize on a lead, and that their sales funnel is always operating at peak efficiency.
“By being able to accurately track all leads — whether they’re coming from calls, the website, or anywhere else — and then easily view the reporting and listen to their calls, it not only makes our job so much easier, it also inspires trust and confidence in our clients,” Coventry says. “We’re working smarter, not harder, and and our clients are happier for it.”
Smarter marketing decisions equals a big boost to conversions
As Webfirm and their clients have learned, marketing decisions that at first appear difficult or complicated may suddenly become a lot easier to make when you have the right data and tech in your toolkit. And better yet, the effective use of these tools can yield excellent results for dedicated marketers.
“[CallRail and call tracking] ultimately helps our clients improve their conversion rate for phone leads, which brings a huge benefit for them — in one case, a client saw a more than 50 percent increase in their phone conversions by using the recorded calls to help with training,” Coventry says. “And that, combined with the reporting, is what we mean when we talk about ‘making better marketing decisions’ with our clients.”
With CallRail’s advanced analytics at their fingertips, Webfirm is able to go deep and make truly impactful decisions that provide a big benefit to the bottom lines of their clients.
“With this reporting, a client can look at their inbound leads and compare that to how they’re spending their marketing budget: If SEO is driving 90 percent of your calls but you’ve only allocated 20 percent of your budget for it, there’s an area where you can immediately improve your marketing and probably see big results for it,” Coventry explains.
Coventry also points to how call tracking isn’t just good for highlighting where you’re excelling — it can also show you where you’re underperforming and in need of improvement, which is equally critical information for any small business owner.
“Are you missing a lot of phone calls, and therefore missing a lot of leads?” he goes on. “You can look at that and say, ‘OK, what time of day are these missed calls coming in?’ Then, you’ll know whether you need to have more people in the office during this time, or whether you need a better answering service after-hours, things like that.”
“Data like call duration can also be valuable for marketers, because if a call lasts past a certain duration, odds are that it’s going to be a solid lead. Then, you trace that back to see which of your channels are driving these longer conversations, so you can improve your marketing accordingly and bring in more high-quality leads.”
